We must learn to love ourselves despite

In front of me, the sun is slowly rising over the building. To my left, the last vestiges of a red dawn hover above the hilltops. There is something magical about early mornings, rising with the dawn to greet the day with the sun. When was the last time you opened the curtains in the morning and took a moment to watch the sun stretch itself like a cat over the horizon? Notice that the darkness vanishes as if it were never there at all.

I know the dawn can be hard. The coming of a new day can remind us of all the things we don’t have. All the things we wish were different. All the things that that we lost. I don’t know about you, but much of my life was spent as a record keeper of all the things that should have been different — all the ways in which the world had wronged me.

I have struggled to come to terms with the circumstances of my life. I was living in such a deep sense of lack that I couldn’t appreciate or acknowledge the abundance that surrounded me. I had lost my way home, the way back to myself.

I could tell you about my road to suffering. I could tell you about who and what ruined my life. But, let’s be honest, it doesn’t really matter.

When we chose to walk through life carrying our hurt and burdens, we become hollow shells of who we could become if we learn how to heal. I am not just saying this. I spent so many years thinking that I was too broken to be healed. I spent many years unconsciously destroying my life because of the trauma that was inflicted on me when I was younger.

I spent so many years at war with myself. I spent so many years thinking that the world owed me something. The truth is the world owed me nothing, even if I felt it owed me everything. The truth is, I spent most of my life dancing along the fine line of life and death. Would today be the day that I finally killed myself? Would today be the day that I found the peace I was seeking?

I was at work one-day last year when a coworker told me that all I do is complain. This small innocuous comment woke me up in a way. I started to look at my life and the way I was talking about it. I realized that he was right. All the things I ever said were to complain about something else: the weather, traffic, my job, my family, how I was too poor, how I wish I could have something. I was so deeply entrenched in my misery all I could do was let it fall from my lips like water.

I want to say that this one comment changed my life, and in many ways, it did. But I also think that it’s always a combination of things that help us wake up to who we are. In my case, I decided to stop complaining and start to take responsibility for my life. Until that point, I had been the damsel in distress, waiting and hoping that something or someone would come and save me from my misery, but there was no one else on stage but me. I could either become the hero of my own story or die waiting for someone to save me.

What happened next was the slow, dramatic, unfolding of who I thought I was. As I am writing this, I realize that it’s been about a year since that moment at my job. The catalyst that drove me forward to this moment.

I have spent the last year digging deeply into myself. Watching as the darkness unfolded before me like a patchwork blanket to reveal the true ways in which I thought about myself. The beliefs that determined how I showed up in this world and the choices I made. What I found I didn’t want to believe, but I knew it was all true. The self-hate, the belief that I wasn’t worthy of love, that I was alone, that I could trust no one, that I was to blame for the assaults against my body. I thought I was completely unrepairable, irrevocably broken. I had turned off my emotions years ago because feeling became unbearable, but with that, I lost my compass. I could only experience the extremes; everything else was lost. And I’ll be honest, mostly what I felt was depression and anxiety, anger and pain. Joy and happiness were as foreign to me as peace for the most part.

I looked at my trauma and cried and held it and loved it for what it was – the parts of myself that I had neglected. The parts of myself that I wished away because I thought I would be consumed by it otherwise. I took them and held them and loved them. I saw how they reached through my life and touched every decision I made. How they led me down paths that I knew were wrong but thought I deserved. I was the barrier to my happiness because, at the deepest level, I thought I was unworthy of it.

As I brought these things into the light of my awareness, I could feel something shatter inside me, a clean break from how I had been showing up in the world. It wasn’t the breaking of who I was; it was me breaking through the shell of who I thought I was and into who I am.

All of this is a long way of saying… when we deny any part of ourselves, we become lost, and the ways in which we show up in the world become skewed. We make choices based in beliefs that we must have something or do something to be worthy of love and happiness. I am here to tell you, dear ones, that we are always and forever whole and were never broken. The only way to fully understand this is to embrace all the parts of ourselves that we are afraid to look at.

It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.

In the Beginning there was Darkness... and then Light

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Alice: I don't much care where. The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go. Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere. The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough. - Lewis Carroll

This quote has always stood out to me. In the book, Alice in Wonderland Alice has become lost in the forest and asks the Cheshire cat for directions. As you can see she didn't get the answer she was hoping for.

I don't know about you, but I've been like this my entire life. Never really sure where to go. Never really sure what I'm doing. I always felt like I was in someone else's video game, more an NPC than the player.

I went through life doing exactly what was expected of me. Tried college after high school and dropped out. Worked full time. Got in a relationship. Moved out. Broke up. Serious injury. Back to school again.

Of course, that is just the cliff notes version of my life, but I imagine if we distill many of our lives down it may look like something similar. But it's the detail that matters. It's the details that we agonize over every day. Which relationships didn't work out. Where we live. What job we have. We are so focused on the story that we don't see the forest for the trees.

Trust me, I'm no different. In between the lines of my life are suicide attempts, abusive relationships, out of control depression and anxiety, serious injury that affected the course of my life... I get it. I've been there. To be honest... I'm still there in a lot of ways. I wake up each morning and some part of me wishes for everything to be changed: My job, my house, where I live, what I'm doing, how much money I make. This stuff isn't new or different from anyone else on the planet. But the fact that we are all suffering from the same sickness should be raising some red flags.

I think society, and the planet, are feeling it. Things aren't okay. We can't go on living the way that we have been taught is how we are supposed to live. In the U.S. I am entrenched in a society that tells me that I must work for a company that I must make a lot of money, and anything less than pulling myself up by my bootstraps means I'm a worthless piece of garbage.

Do you feel that?

We are telling people that their contribution to society isn't enough unless they fit one mold. That people who find the idea of working all day inside a poorly lit office inside a cubical insane that they shouldn't make an attempt to be happy.

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy'. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life.” - John Lennon

I think John Lennon had it right. We have all been looking at what society wants from us and attempting to find happiness outside ourselves. We drink to forget. We smoke to forget. We have an opiate epidemic not because people are in more pain, but because they are trying to escape the pain of their own lives. Don't believe me? Here is a study about "Rat Park."

We are all so caught up in our additions, whether it's drugs, food, or television, that we can't even admit something is wrong. We go on Facebook when we feel lonely and want connection instead of reaching out to someone tangible. We eat when we're not hungry else we have to feel something inside of us that may be uncomfortable. We watch hour after hour of television because it's the only way we can quiet our ever racing minds. Well, I know that all of that was true for me anyway.

My point is this: we are all looking in the wrong place for what will bring us the contentment, happiness, and joy that we are all seeking every day. I'm not one day going to find the perfect job that will fillful my every need. I'm not going to one day find a partner who knows exactly what I want and need in every moment of the day. I'm not going to stuff myself with food and expect to feel good afterward. These are all just poorly wrapped bandaids that quickly come off and expose the wound underneath, which makes us try to wrap it up again.

What I propose is trying something different-- something radical. Maybe we should try living from the inside out. It's within us that we can find our greatest happiness and joy. We can learn to live in our truth and stop denying the things that bring us exactly what we're looking for: happiness. Think about it, we have the compacity right now for the kind of joy and excitement we would have if we found out we won the PowerBall. Imagine it. It sure felt real for a moment didn't it?

We don't have to wait for something arbitrarily good to happy for us to be happy. We can choose to be happy right now.

I guess this is just a long way of saying that life is more than mimsy. Life can be more than mimsy if we allow it to be. But it's a choice we have to make. To stand in the truth of who we are or to continue searching for something outside of us to make us happy.

The choice is yours. The choice is always available to you. We can choose as many times as we must to stand in our own happiness and joy. Each time we breathe in... we have another opportunity to chose.